The Dallas Museum of Art’s new Friends and Partners program, which includes the unprecedented combination of free admissions and free memberships to all, has already received a thorough rundown by our Michael Granberry.

On Monday afternoon, DMA director Maxwell Anderson briefed a City Council committee on the program and added a few more details, mostly about social media and other technology.

Visitors can sign up for free to become a “Friend” of the DMA and accumulate points each time they visit, much like you see everywhere from supermarkets to airlines, Anderson said. Those points can be cashed in for free parking, store discounts, special exhibition discounts and museum experiences tailored to the visitors’ interests.

iPads will be placed at the entrances for “Friends” to sign in and also earn points toward electronic badges similar to those on Foursquare. And as visitors provide the museum with more information about their interests, they’ll received tips on items at the DMA that might intersect with those interests.

“If you’re interested in Jazz on Late Nights, we can also encourage you to go into the galleries and see a martini shaker from the 1920s,” Anderson said.

If visitors don’t want to sign up or open up about their interests to the DMA, Anderson said they can “walk in the door, no one will bother them, and they can walk in the galleries at no charge.”

Anderson previously said this approach is intended to bring in more visitors as well as more diverse visitors. He said the museum will map where its visitors live (or at least the ones who sign up) and will show that distribution in real time on the DMA website.

Council member Vonciel Jones Hill brought up the difficulty of reach this goal, saying “you [Anderson] are more optimistic than I am that the cultural shift will happen on a significant basis.”

“There is a mind set about what the Museum of Art is,” she said. “And I think that attracts a particular segment of the population and leaves out a large segment.”

When you can slip into a gallery for just 15 minutes to see a favorite painting, or when parents can take their children without having to budget for it, the museum takes on a societal function… For Dallas, a museum membership should be like a library card: everyone should have one, and it should foster an engagement with the museum that goes beyond the occasional visit to a kind of civic pride.